8 ms·

The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing wit

The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground. Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity. GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf? It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses

politelemon 8y ago
Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++). GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support. > That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.
- spricket 8y ago
  Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along. 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    > Windows 95 in a VM Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky. So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.
  - S_A_P 8y ago
    Fellow consultant here that has seen a lot of similar issues. I am currently tasked with rewriting a Delphi application that supports business in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It was written by a guy in his garage in Alabama. He sold the source code to the former parent company of my client. We now have a vm of the image of the guys laptop and the heavily customized Delphi environment required to build this application should a change be required. Apparently he built a bunch of delphi ide plugins to configure the environment, and should you try to build it with the latest Delphi IDE, you are SOL.
  - ramshanker 8y ago
    Yes yes, there is a WinXP PC in our department with screen covered with a white paper with large font size text "This PC is under remote operation by Structure department, Do Not Shut it down." Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.
    - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
- scarface74 8y ago
  As far as I know, AWS has never abandoned a service. They deprecate services and occasionally make services unavailable for new accounts.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    SimpleDB is probably a good example. You can find 5 year old threads discussing whether Amazon is going to kill it. But it appears to still be there.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      The business value they’ve gained by earning the trust to not kill services is far higher than their cost to keep some old things in maintenance mode, I assume
    - manigandham 8y ago
      SimpleDB is still used by Amazon's own services, it's not going anywhere.
  - ComputerGuru 8y ago
    Technically Amazon and not AWS but they deprecated then removed two separate payment APIs one after the other (SimplePay and another). It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother? Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.
    - vishnugupta 8y ago
      > another I was in a team that worked on "another" :-). Some of the best memories of my professional life were formed during that period! At launch that was indeed as part of AWS. However it then came under Amazon Payments entity due to legal reasons. Felt sad to see it retired though[1] [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=3045 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=3045
    - PaulHoule 8y ago
      I think payment APIs have all kinds of social and legal problems associated with them that go beyond the technical.
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  > 1 year notice makes me laugh that they think 1 year notice is enough. should be at least 5 for my business to properly consider it.
- kijin 8y ago
  Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and now even Canonical offer at least 10 years of support for their core products. That should be the bar for anyone who wants to enter the "enterprise" market. What's the point of using a software stack that comes with 10 years of support if the platform you're running it on won't be there in 10 years?
- snarfy 8y ago
  Support is the main reason I wouldn't use GCP. Production is down and the only response I get is an automated email? No thanks.
  - dijit 8y ago
    Honestly that was my experience with Amazon. GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon) I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support. The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I understand.
    - true_tuna 8y ago
      I paid for GCP support. It was laughable. I’d send a question like: I’m using feature A to do XYZ. The documentation <here> does not include corner case XYZ. Please advise. They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.
- mac_was 8y ago
  '1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate' - that is barely enough for a SMB and it is not possible or acceptable for any enterprise customer! Imagine how long it takes to investigate on new solutions, rewriting stuff, testing it, releasing, etc... 1 year is a joke which I might accept as a startup with a single node.js app but would not as a CTO of any company.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Yeah one year is a step in right direction, but in the enterprises that I’ve worked at, getting capex for maintenance activity like that is usually an 18-24 month process. If everything on a platform is an emergency, that vendor won’t be around in those businesses.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aedron 8y ago
Yet going by the article, Google's response is more sales people and better training of their sales people. Good luck with that.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Building a larger and better sales org is exactly what Google should have been doing starting 5 years ago.
godzillabrennus 8y ago
Let us not forget the Google Maps price bump still fresh in everyone’s mind. That was a kind way of reminding customers that Google isn’t serious about cloud. Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.
- aqwsedopl 8y ago
  Microsoft’s bias towards windows stunted it’s growth severely. It seems googles bias towards its ad-revenue based models is something similar. Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam. Fundamentally, as long as google offers free services funded by converting its user data into anonymous normal distributions to be sold, I don’t think google will ever be able to overcome its stigma as a non privacy focused company. I don’t care how many privacy menu settings or SPA control panels it offers. It’s like asking if fb is ever going to be trustworthy.. haha When a new company scales out a better search algorithm updates as fast as google... on top of aws infrastructure.. that would be interesting I wonder what is amazons weakness that will be its undoing It’s been ten years.. still waiting for google to give me a reliable customer service phone number on the quality of amazons.. heck I’m still waiting for google to offer a user service where I know it won’t just die or change 180 arbitrarily. I think it’s a little too late by now. Does the general public even trust in google being a secure, reliable company? Doesn’t seem that way imho
  - aqwsedopl 8y ago
    Finally, I posit that the app ecosystem, specifically that in iOS, is the killer weapon apple holds against google. Apple literally has infinite source of free developers who can crank out apps rivaling the quality of googles free offerings... all for less than ten dollars an app. iCloudsync has mostly killed google docs and google drives cloud sync advantage across the board. Apples app ecosystem literally is infinitely horizontally scalable, while googles app ecosystem can’t even offer competent customer service for five core apps.. hmmmm I wonder who will win. Ironically parts of iCloud sync are probably using a aws for sure and maybe even google cloud as backbone.
scandox 8y ago
We're building new services on GCP and we like it, but even still for each element we develop a formal plan for moving it somewhere else because everyone here feels like severe and arbitrary changes or even termination is always a lurking possibility.
patwolf 8y ago
I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use. I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud services, the same way people logically separate AWS from the Amazon store. I've never noticed a GCP service removed in the nearly 10 years I've used them. In fact, the pattern I see with GCP is that they're slower to add services , but the ones they do release are very well thought out and solid. AWS, on the other hand, seems to add tons of services, some of which are incomplete or never get traction. I would happily use either AWS or GCP. IBM Cloud and Azure I'm far less inclined to use, although I can understand Microsoft shops wanting to use Azure. IBM Cloud is pointless.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-azure-blob-storage-from-your-apps-using-s3-api/ https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sigfubar 8y ago
    S3 API compatibility is there because creators of open source "data engineering" tools have in the early days rushed to develop their tools around the S3 API. I can make the case that the need for a properly abstracted storage layer should have been obvious, but in that early gold rush no one would have listened to such reason. Nowadays vendors are stuck shipping S3 compatibility layers in order to avoid locking out tools that cannot work without S3. If you think I'm wrong, imagine for a moment what life would be like if every RDBMS client in existence got written in terms of Oracle's wire protocol, back when Oracle's RDBMS offering dominated its respective market. Thankfully that parallel universe is somebody else's problem right now, but it could have happened.
skywhopper 8y ago
Your Golang mention reads as a total non-sequitur. I'm not even sure what it means. I think you are mad that they didn't provide a way to pin dependencies built-in to the language from the get-go? But few if any languages provide that. In every case I can think of, package management is done by an external tool. The only exception is... oh right, Golang now builds it in, including the ability to pin old versions. Sure it took a while, but what does that have to do with anything else you say here? If anything Golang is a counter-argument to your thesis about why GCP isn't taking off. You're right that Google has done abysmally with its commitment to keeping services running for the long haul. But Go itself has been remarkably stable and compatible over the years since its introduction. Far moreso than Python, Rust, or JS in the same time period.
- spricket 8y ago
  It's an example of how they treat "old" code, services or otherwise. Fixup your code to use new version or you can't build. Replace "build" with "deploy" and you have the policy of GCP. Now it's been a few years and they may have fixed this, but Go was the only language I've ever used that didn't let you pin dependency versions
  - 1-KB-OK 8y ago
    It's a fair criticism of the older versions of Go - it did not have good dependency management out of the box. Probably due to the famous Google monorepo and how they did not need to tackle that issue head on themselves. However the past few years Go has really addressed this problem, first through the dep project (which has your standard .lock file for pinning dependencies similar to Node) and now go modules (included in the latest Go versions). Now you get dependency management out of the box. Your point is valid but does not reflect the modern state of Go.
  - LoneWolf123 8y ago
    You may want to use this small script: "Like 'go get' but with pinned package versions. A tiny shell script". https://github.com/joewalnes/go-getter https://github.com/joewalnes/go-getter
ohaideredevs 8y ago
"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN. Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious. As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc. AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs. I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue. Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.
- spricket 8y ago
  It really comes down to having code I can copy-paste. Google's documentation tends to be minimalist, like a research paper. One small example for everything, just enough to cover every feature. AWS is closer to "copy paste this big blob and modify it a bit". A lot less work for people trying to implement. I'm not planning to read all the documentation, I just want something that works. Google almost forces you to in many cases
  - ohaideredevs 8y ago
    That's true. Ideally it would be both - very clear explanations WITH code snippets, which are important to avoid missing "that one little thing" for half an hour when writing code from scratch.
  - true_tuna 8y ago
    It’s more that copy paste. It’s a philosophy of what the documentation is for. If I’m looking at a doc I’m here because I want to do a specific task. The documentation should be task centric like the instructions for a university homework assignment. Imagine you want 30 people to practice a novel task in one evening. You taught them theory in class. Now you want them to try it out. Give them step by step instructions they can use to apply general knowledge to this specific case. When I’m reading about load balancers and certs I don’t need a textbook. I need examples of specific commands. Instructions on using your tool to do my specific task.
harlanji 8y ago
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. I’ve been thinking about building a 10yr hosting plan for my own want. I thought designing static and then hosting on RasPi behind CDN would be great, just stock enough spares and keep Internet service live... 3G or better sufficient.
jniedrauer 8y ago
> See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf? This doesn't necessarily detract from your point, but this hasn't been true since the release of module support in go 1.11 last year.
nik736 8y ago
How are SoftLayer bare metal servers good value? Seriously, have you even checked how old the hardware is and what they charge for it? It's a complete ripoff.
landa 8y ago
I find it much easier to use Google Cloud Platform compared to AWS. That's why I use it over AWS.
- true_tuna 8y ago
  Where do you find documentation?
manigandham 8y ago
IBM/Softlayer value differential for dedicated servers disappeared years ago. Cloud VMs are now faster, cheaper, and more reliable (because of abstracted components and live migration), and they all have dedicated nodes if you need isolation. IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.

politelemon 8y ago

Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++). GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support. > That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.

spricket 8y ago
Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along. 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  > Windows 95 in a VM Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky. So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.
- S_A_P 8y ago
  Fellow consultant here that has seen a lot of similar issues. I am currently tasked with rewriting a Delphi application that supports business in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It was written by a guy in his garage in Alabama. He sold the source code to the former parent company of my client. We now have a vm of the image of the guys laptop and the heavily customized Delphi environment required to build this application should a change be required. Apparently he built a bunch of delphi ide plugins to configure the environment, and should you try to build it with the latest Delphi IDE, you are SOL.
- ramshanker 8y ago
  Yes yes, there is a WinXP PC in our department with screen covered with a white paper with large font size text "This PC is under remote operation by Structure department, Do Not Shut it down." Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
scarface74 8y ago
As far as I know, AWS has never abandoned a service. They deprecate services and occasionally make services unavailable for new accounts.
- tyingq 8y ago
  SimpleDB is probably a good example. You can find 5 year old threads discussing whether Amazon is going to kill it. But it appears to still be there.
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    The business value they’ve gained by earning the trust to not kill services is far higher than their cost to keep some old things in maintenance mode, I assume
  - manigandham 8y ago
    SimpleDB is still used by Amazon's own services, it's not going anywhere.
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  Technically Amazon and not AWS but they deprecated then removed two separate payment APIs one after the other (SimplePay and another). It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother? Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.
  - vishnugupta 8y ago
    > another I was in a team that worked on "another" :-). Some of the best memories of my professional life were formed during that period! At launch that was indeed as part of AWS. However it then came under Amazon Payments entity due to legal reasons. Felt sad to see it retired though[1] [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=3045 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=3045
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    I think payment APIs have all kinds of social and legal problems associated with them that go beyond the technical.
PunchTornado 8y ago
> 1 year notice makes me laugh that they think 1 year notice is enough. should be at least 5 for my business to properly consider it.
kijin 8y ago
Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and now even Canonical offer at least 10 years of support for their core products. That should be the bar for anyone who wants to enter the "enterprise" market. What's the point of using a software stack that comes with 10 years of support if the platform you're running it on won't be there in 10 years?
snarfy 8y ago
Support is the main reason I wouldn't use GCP. Production is down and the only response I get is an automated email? No thanks.
- dijit 8y ago
  Honestly that was my experience with Amazon. GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon) I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support. The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I understand.
  - true_tuna 8y ago
    I paid for GCP support. It was laughable. I’d send a question like: I’m using feature A to do XYZ. The documentation <here> does not include corner case XYZ. Please advise. They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.
mac_was 8y ago
'1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate' - that is barely enough for a SMB and it is not possible or acceptable for any enterprise customer! Imagine how long it takes to investigate on new solutions, rewriting stuff, testing it, releasing, etc... 1 year is a joke which I might accept as a startup with a single node.js app but would not as a CTO of any company.
Spooky23 8y ago
Yeah one year is a step in right direction, but in the enterprises that I’ve worked at, getting capex for maintenance activity like that is usually an 18-24 month process. If everything on a platform is an emergency, that vendor won’t be around in those businesses.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

aedron 8y ago

Yet going by the article, Google's response is more sales people and better training of their sales people. Good luck with that.

jacques_chester 8y ago
Building a larger and better sales org is exactly what Google should have been doing starting 5 years ago.

godzillabrennus 8y ago

Let us not forget the Google Maps price bump still fresh in everyone’s mind. That was a kind way of reminding customers that Google isn’t serious about cloud. Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.

aqwsedopl 8y ago
Microsoft’s bias towards windows stunted it’s growth severely. It seems googles bias towards its ad-revenue based models is something similar. Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam. Fundamentally, as long as google offers free services funded by converting its user data into anonymous normal distributions to be sold, I don’t think google will ever be able to overcome its stigma as a non privacy focused company. I don’t care how many privacy menu settings or SPA control panels it offers. It’s like asking if fb is ever going to be trustworthy.. haha When a new company scales out a better search algorithm updates as fast as google... on top of aws infrastructure.. that would be interesting I wonder what is amazons weakness that will be its undoing It’s been ten years.. still waiting for google to give me a reliable customer service phone number on the quality of amazons.. heck I’m still waiting for google to offer a user service where I know it won’t just die or change 180 arbitrarily. I think it’s a little too late by now. Does the general public even trust in google being a secure, reliable company? Doesn’t seem that way imho
- aqwsedopl 8y ago
  Finally, I posit that the app ecosystem, specifically that in iOS, is the killer weapon apple holds against google. Apple literally has infinite source of free developers who can crank out apps rivaling the quality of googles free offerings... all for less than ten dollars an app. iCloudsync has mostly killed google docs and google drives cloud sync advantage across the board. Apples app ecosystem literally is infinitely horizontally scalable, while googles app ecosystem can’t even offer competent customer service for five core apps.. hmmmm I wonder who will win. Ironically parts of iCloud sync are probably using a aws for sure and maybe even google cloud as backbone.

scandox 8y ago

We're building new services on GCP and we like it, but even still for each element we develop a formal plan for moving it somewhere else because everyone here feels like severe and arbitrary changes or even termination is always a lurking possibility.

patwolf 8y ago

I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use. I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud services, the same way people logically separate AWS from the Amazon store. I've never noticed a GCP service removed in the nearly 10 years I've used them. In fact, the pattern I see with GCP is that they're slower to add services , but the ones they do release are very well thought out and solid. AWS, on the other hand, seems to add tons of services, some of which are incomplete or never get traction. I would happily use either AWS or GCP. IBM Cloud and Azure I'm far less inclined to use, although I can understand Microsoft shops wanting to use Azure. IBM Cloud is pointless.

StreamBright 8y ago
Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-azure-blob-storage-from-your-apps-using-s3-api/ https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sigfubar 8y ago
  S3 API compatibility is there because creators of open source "data engineering" tools have in the early days rushed to develop their tools around the S3 API. I can make the case that the need for a properly abstracted storage layer should have been obvious, but in that early gold rush no one would have listened to such reason. Nowadays vendors are stuck shipping S3 compatibility layers in order to avoid locking out tools that cannot work without S3. If you think I'm wrong, imagine for a moment what life would be like if every RDBMS client in existence got written in terms of Oracle's wire protocol, back when Oracle's RDBMS offering dominated its respective market. Thankfully that parallel universe is somebody else's problem right now, but it could have happened.

skywhopper 8y ago

Your Golang mention reads as a total non-sequitur. I'm not even sure what it means. I think you are mad that they didn't provide a way to pin dependencies built-in to the language from the get-go? But few if any languages provide that. In every case I can think of, package management is done by an external tool. The only exception is... oh right, Golang now builds it in, including the ability to pin old versions. Sure it took a while, but what does that have to do with anything else you say here? If anything Golang is a counter-argument to your thesis about why GCP isn't taking off. You're right that Google has done abysmally with its commitment to keeping services running for the long haul. But Go itself has been remarkably stable and compatible over the years since its introduction. Far moreso than Python, Rust, or JS in the same time period.

spricket 8y ago
It's an example of how they treat "old" code, services or otherwise. Fixup your code to use new version or you can't build. Replace "build" with "deploy" and you have the policy of GCP. Now it's been a few years and they may have fixed this, but Go was the only language I've ever used that didn't let you pin dependency versions
- 1-KB-OK 8y ago
  It's a fair criticism of the older versions of Go - it did not have good dependency management out of the box. Probably due to the famous Google monorepo and how they did not need to tackle that issue head on themselves. However the past few years Go has really addressed this problem, first through the dep project (which has your standard .lock file for pinning dependencies similar to Node) and now go modules (included in the latest Go versions). Now you get dependency management out of the box. Your point is valid but does not reflect the modern state of Go.
- LoneWolf123 8y ago
  You may want to use this small script: "Like 'go get' but with pinned package versions. A tiny shell script". https://github.com/joewalnes/go-getter https://github.com/joewalnes/go-getter

ohaideredevs 8y ago

"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN. Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious. As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc. AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs. I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue. Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.

spricket 8y ago
It really comes down to having code I can copy-paste. Google's documentation tends to be minimalist, like a research paper. One small example for everything, just enough to cover every feature. AWS is closer to "copy paste this big blob and modify it a bit". A lot less work for people trying to implement. I'm not planning to read all the documentation, I just want something that works. Google almost forces you to in many cases
- ohaideredevs 8y ago
  That's true. Ideally it would be both - very clear explanations WITH code snippets, which are important to avoid missing "that one little thing" for half an hour when writing code from scratch.
- true_tuna 8y ago
  It’s more that copy paste. It’s a philosophy of what the documentation is for. If I’m looking at a doc I’m here because I want to do a specific task. The documentation should be task centric like the instructions for a university homework assignment. Imagine you want 30 people to practice a novel task in one evening. You taught them theory in class. Now you want them to try it out. Give them step by step instructions they can use to apply general knowledge to this specific case. When I’m reading about load balancers and certs I don’t need a textbook. I need examples of specific commands. Instructions on using your tool to do my specific task.

harlanji 8y ago

> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. I’ve been thinking about building a 10yr hosting plan for my own want. I thought designing static and then hosting on RasPi behind CDN would be great, just stock enough spares and keep Internet service live... 3G or better sufficient.

jniedrauer 8y ago

> See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf? This doesn't necessarily detract from your point, but this hasn't been true since the release of module support in go 1.11 last year.

nik736 8y ago

How are SoftLayer bare metal servers good value? Seriously, have you even checked how old the hardware is and what they charge for it? It's a complete ripoff.

landa 8y ago

I find it much easier to use Google Cloud Platform compared to AWS. That's why I use it over AWS.

true_tuna 8y ago
Where do you find documentation?

manigandham 8y ago

IBM/Softlayer value differential for dedicated servers disappeared years ago. Cloud VMs are now faster, cheaper, and more reliable (because of abstracted components and live migration), and they all have dedicated nodes if you need isolation. IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.